This was an incredibly dense episode, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And there was a big blurring of factions. Who is on whose side? I don't even know at this point whose side Dillon is on. For that matter, I still don't know whose side I'm on.

Kiera is supposedly the good guy in this story, even though she is trying to restore a future that is clearly evil. In this episode, during an anti-corporation rally, she was taken prisoner by Julian, the future mass murdering terrorist. And yet, Julian not only sees himself as George Washington and Nelson Mandela and has absorbed the fact that ideas are more powerful than bullets, he let Kiera go without hurting her.

Julian managed to come out as morally superior to the Vancouver cops. In an obvious parallel to what happened to Kiera, Jasmine Garza was taken by the police, who with their new Piron mandate decided to just deep six her civil rights and torture Travis's location out of her. Carlos, the conscience of the series, was very unhappy about it -- he is clearly not going to find it easy to become a corporate brownshirt.

Garza literally kicked butt, both as the badassiest of badass prisoners and during her inevitable escape in which she killed the evil-and-possibly-deserving-of-death Martinez. I can't help enjoying Garza as a character. She's the opposite side of the Kiera coin, and not just in this episode.

So Garza was then taken by the Freelancers, who were also chasing Kiera. They have scary future tech that makes disappearing Kiera reappear, and they're tough enough to take Garza, too. What is the Freelancer agenda? And what is going on with the suddenly-back-in-the-story Curtis Chen, who was killed by Kiera's backfiring super gun in the third episode of the series?

Is Curtis Chen still alive somehow, or is Lucas hallucinating? I wasn't sure if Lucas was faking dementia for some reason of his own in the last episode, but no, he's not. Was there a mention before of temporal dementia? At any rate, Chen has Freelancer dots between his fingers, and I think the flashforward of Travis visiting Chen's cell where they discussed philosophy and the circle and symbols on the walls and the fact that their fight wasn't over suggested that Chen is indeed still with us somehow. How?

Is Chen working for the Freelancers, then? And what about Escher, who just took another giant step into the plot? Since Escher also has the dots, what is his relationship with the Freelancers? And what is he doing with poor Emily?

I've wanted to like Emily before, and now I feel like I can. We still don't know who she is or where she came from (or where she got her awesome butt-kicking skills) but she truly does love Alec, and she has no idea what Escher's agenda is, much like the audience. Escher just set up Alec with a bugged new phone and a romantic dinner with Emily so that he could drop by and introduce himself, and he appears to know Alec so well that he knows Alec wants much more than epic wealth. Why does Escher want to detach Alec from Kellog? Not that that's a bad idea.

Did Emily lie about the contents of the lab to protect Alec's interests? Of course she did. Did Alec lie to Kiera about the elder Alec's message? I'm still confused about that, but I think he did. At least Kiera knows now that she was sent to the past deliberately. Although didn't she know that already, what with the "read me" message in her CMR?

The parallels continued with the absolutely hilarious Travis/Kiera conference call and duo CMR reboot, bringing Travis way too close to Alec. I think what this particular plot bit was about was to remind us that Kiera and Travis are similar beings, physically perverted by an evil future to be used as cannon fodder.

This episode advanced way too many plot points and didn't complete any of them. It made me realize how many factions this show has introduced, and how little we still know about each of them.

Maybe it's time for some answers?

Bits and pieces:

-- Kiera is looking for Gardiner but hasn't found his body yet.

-- The flashforwards emphasized that Travis believes in Kagame and Theseus as if it were his religion.

-- The mob guy with the glasses is working against Travis. I don't think he's going to live very long.

-- Alec's "Arc" is like a one-page internet. That sounds potentially valuable.

-- Kellog dropped by Liber8 to ask Sonya to investigate Escher. Huh.

-- Loved Kiera's "knock-out bullet". Cool.

Quotes:

Travis: "Don't fear death. Each ending is merely a new beginning."
An interesting thing to say to a supposedly dead character.

2 comments:

I love the sequence of the protest. First, Kiera is among the protesters, Julian manages to conquer people’s attention (he’s really good at speaking out), then Kiera walks away to lure the Freelancers into a trap, only there is the accidental videoconference with Travis, after which she fights against the Freelancers. Then she’s back among the protesters to hide herself and uses the protest and the police to create a distraction (in a very smart way)... only to fall in the hands of Julian. It’s great writing all around, how one piece of the plot connects to the other, while the show takes its time to preach a little through the protest, and the scene never feels overstuffed. Also, the stunts are awesome!

The Freelancers arc is certainly heating up. I was so nervous when they abducted Garza, that was a very cool moment.

Nice catch on the parallels of how the police treated Garza versus how Julian treated Kiera, Billie. I hadn’t picked up on that one.